Environmental justice in the age of big data: challenging toxic blind spots of voice, speed, and expertise (original) (raw)
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The sixth chapter looks at another emerging technology in the field of global environmental governance: big data. We live in a world of data. Today more than ever, data are at the center of the economy. Individuals, organizations, and governments consume and produce large amounts of data. If the concept of big data aims to describe how large and complex data sets are analyzed15, it also describes how organizations collect data from new sources. This chapter provides an overview of the current and potential opportunities that big data offer in the context of global environmental governance. It will first discuss the concept of big data and then its applications in fields related to global environmental governance, focusing on knowledge production and distribution. Big data technologies cover extensive spatial scales and a wide range of scientific fields. Hence organizations can identify trends and patterns in the complexity of human behaviors and the diversity of species and ecosystems16. They can also develop prediction models based on facts and data.
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